


the stars and infinity on high

by halfmoonsevenstars



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfmoonsevenstars/pseuds/halfmoonsevenstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve thought it was rather like living in a bad charcoal sketch: too much negative space and shadow, not enough in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stars and infinity on high

The nuns had apparently held some kind of convention to give the kids at the orphanage the ugliest uniform in the history of _anything_ , Steve decided early on. It wasn’t that he necessarily cared about looking sharp, but still, a bony little twerp like him needed all the help he could get. Instead, the boys had to wear itchy wool blazers with buttons so cheap they scratched under the swipe of a light fingernail, cotton shirts starched until they could just about stand up on their own, and trousers to match their jackets. It was small comfort that the girls also wore those same rigid blouses under their equally itchy wool pinafores. Nobody’s shoes really fit, either, so the kids all got together after every Christmas and swapped. And it was all so _gray_. Even the white shirts took on a gray cast after a few months from all the harsh detergents. But it matched everything else—the walls, floors, bed frames, bedclothes, food, and even the sisters themselves.  For all their starkly contrasting black-and-white nun’s habits, they still somehow managed to be utterly toneless.

Steve thought it was rather like living in a bad charcoal sketch: too much negative space and shadow, not enough in between. There was simply nothing to love here, nothing much to even _like_ , except when everyone left him the hell alone for an hour or two so he could draw scenes of places that he’d much rather be, even if he’d never been to them before. The nuns weren’t really a bad sort, merely preoccupied. Steve had never expected them to take any notice of him, not even from the first day, because at ten, he’d already gotten used to the idea of being invisible to everyone except his mother.

By the time he was thirteen, Steve had gotten used to the idea of just being invisible, period.

But that was all right with him. If anyone only remembered Steve because he kept jumping into fights he was never going to win, just to prove a point or save someone littler and weaker from a thrashing, he didn’t so much mind that. At least it _meant_ something, even if the only color that ever came into his world was the tenacious scarlet he watched swirl around the cracked porcelain of the sink and down the drain afterwards.

Steve’s world became a little less duochromatic the spring before he turned fourteen, with the arrival of a new boy with unruly dark hair that never seemed to want to stay combed, his mouth a crooked question mark around the corners. The nuns called him James, but he called himself Bucky, which Steve thought was pretty stupid, considering that Bucky was just about his age, and it made him sound like a cartoon character instead of an almost grown person. But seeing as how they pretty much never interacted except maybe to pass the toothpaste down the line of sinks in the morning, Steve didn’t really give a shit _what_ he called himself. Within a couple of weeks, though, Bucky was popular with just about everybody, from the tiniest kids up through the oldest ones, because he could tell a dirty joke and shoot marbles and fix busted toys while making it all look easy as pie.

The problem with popular kids, in Steve’s experience, was that they usually tended to be bullies when nobody was looking. And popular kids who somehow made the uniform look like so much more than the poorly-tailored castoffs that they were got on Steve’s goddamn _nerves_. Murphy was one of those types, although it was frankly inexplicable, as he had a hair-trigger temper and no compunction whatsoever about indulging it.

They were interrupted by Bucky, who’d been passing by in the hallway on his way to play stickball in the asphalt courtyard, a purloined broom handle stuffed under his arm.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” he wanted to know.

“None of your business,” Murphy said, and he kicked at Steve again, catching him in the side and making him cry out in pain.

Steve really kind of hated Murphy right about then.

“I mean it. What the fuck are you doing?” Bucky, for the first time that Steve had ever seen him (even though he had to squint up at Bucky with one eye, the other already swelling shut), looked absolutely _furious_. His customary little smile had disappeared, and without it, he was menacing.

“He got in the way. Don’t worry about it, we’re just about done anyway.”

Steve had, at least, managed to haul himself back to his feet by this time. “I was distracting this moron while the Walsh kid got away,” he said, his back stiff and his fists already curled at his sides, ready to raise them again if necessary. “She accidentally bumped into him and he took it personal.”

“Isn’t she nine years old?” Bucky asked, tilting his head down to get a better look at Steve, and his blue eyes had gone dark, like a storm coming in over the water.

“Eight.”

Bucky turned back toward Murphy. “The fuck is _wrong_ with you? You’re fifteen, man. And Rogers is all of ninety pounds with his shoes on and change in his pockets.”

Murphy opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and then shut it again shortly before taking off like someone had lit a Sterno can under his ass. For his part, Steve was mostly surprised that Bucky knew his name.

“That was a good thing you were doing. Stupid as shit, but good,” Bucky informed him.

Steve shrugged. “I can’t help it. I don’t like bullies.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Bucky said after a moment. “I’ve got a sister, and she’s young enough that we had some relatives who adopted her. She’s going to a boarding school up in Boston right now, and if I were there I’d knock the shit out of anyone I caught messing with her. You don’t even know that little Walsh girl, but you felt the same way.”

“Not to be rude, because you _did_ just save me a trip to Sister Therese’s chamber of horrors, but how would you know what I feel about anything?” Steve wanted to know.

Bucky surprised him a second time by laughing. “You’re all right, Rogers, you know that?” he said, and slung an arm around Steve’s shoulders, half-carrying him, half leading the way to the washroom, where Bucky used a ridiculous amount of paper towels and cold water to get the worst of the blood off Steve’s face and shirt collar.

The sound of his laughter was like sunshine, and whenever Steve used yellow after that day, he thought of it, and that day.

Over the next few years, Steve gathered more pieces of Bucky to him like Prismacolor pencils, a different hue for each one of Bucky’s moods, for his likes and his dislikes, for the things that were important to him. Midnight blue was the color of how Bucky would sneak a comic book into Sister Therese’s infirmary whenever Steve was ill by slipping it into his schoolwork. His hatred of cabbage boiled until it was limp and flavorless was electric green; the way Bucky could instantly recall the stats for any Brooklyn Dodger from 1913 on, burnt sienna. His anger wasn’t red the way others might have drawn it—instead it was deep, bruised violet; his joy the hue of a golden winter dawn refracted through ice-coated tree branches; fuchsia was the color of Bucky’s hugs, warm and fierce and lingering. By the time they left the orphanage, Steve figured that he just about had the whole set. As he’d never had a complete set of _anything_ before, he was pleased by that. Running through a mental inventory of all Bucky’s colors was one of his favorite activities, especially when he was stuck at home, too sick to do anything useful but too restless to be content lying on the sofa and listening to the radio.

He added one more color to the box the morning Bucky shipped out to Camp Lehigh: seashell pink, fragile and fleeting and sweet.

It was the color of Bucky’s mouth on his own, tasting like peppermint toothpaste and coffee, surprising Steve with its softness, even though it wasn’t the first time they’d ever kissed. (No, that had been the day they moved into their first apartment, a shoebox-sized rattrap, but it was _theirs,_ and Bucky had been so excited.) The other times had been different, less ephemeral; Steve supposed it was because they’d thought they could have the whole rest of the century to themselves, happily scraping along under the radar and only being noticed by one another. This one, though, contained something new and wistful, and Steve couldn’t help wishing it had something of the old cerulean brightness.

“Let’s not ruin the goodbyes by making you come with me, okay? The weather’s horrible,” Bucky said quietly, brushing a lock of hair out of Steve’s eyes.

“It’s only rain,” Steve told him, catching Bucky’s hand in his own.

Bucky sighed. “You’re gonna catch a cold if I let you come.”

Steve squeezed Bucky’s hand. “Don’t be an idiot. You don’t catch a cold from the rain.”

“You catch colds from looking at _pictures_ of the rain, Steve.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Steve wanted to know.

Bucky just laughed at him that time and shook his head. “You stubborn little shit,” he said affectionately, and pulled Steve close again for a second kiss; it was much the same as the one before, but a little warmer, like the last stubborn days of summer hanging around into September.

It was something he didn’t think to do, figuring out what shade that last kiss should be, until he returned from Grand Central Station, where he’d stood on the edge of the platform half-concealed by a pillar as the train pulled out of its berth and began making its way south, watching Bucky lean out the window and wave at him until he was too small to see anymore. But he made sure the moment was kept safe, that it had its own color.

The box broke open one frigid day in the Alps. Pencils fell to the ground and splintered, their brilliant hues muting until they faded away completely.  He tried to get them all back, tried to stop it from happening, but they only slipped through his fingers. Only one pencil was left when all was said and done; it bore a marked resemblance to the toneless shade of those early days at the orphanage, where everything ran together like a still-wet painting smeared and smudged by a careless child until the figures were no longer recognizable.

Steve was grateful for the white of the glacier rising up to meet him.

At least it was some other color than gray.

**Author's Note:**

> “Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”  
> ― Vincent van Gogh


End file.
